Reach For Me

by Elizabeth Cole

  “Ok,” he said to everyone. “We can talk while I feed him.”

  But no one talked. A moment later, Mal looked up to see the others staring at him. “What?”

  “It’s just very…domestic looking. In a weird way,” Vinny said after a second. She exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Dom.

  His older brother shook his head. “We’ve missed a whole lot.”

  “I got them up to speed on everything I know,” Lex told Mal. “But we need to plan our next moves. Did you convince Cara to come back here?”

  “No. She barely talked to me today. She’s staying at the Calendar Inn, which is moderately safe, as long as she doesn’t invite anyone into her room.”

  “She needs more protection than that,” Dom said.

  “I cast a protection spell on my medal and crucifix,” Mal said. “With her true name. She’s still wearing it, I think.”

  “Your own necklace?” Dom asked, surprised.

  “It’s what I had. And I figured my connection to it would strengthen my otherwise weak-sauce casting ability.”

  Dom nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that could help a lot. But I’d still like her to be here.”

  “So would Mal,” Lex murmured.

  Mal kicked him under the table.

  “Tell us more about the summoning circle,” Dom said, mercifully not noticing Lex’s comment.

  “It’s progressing. Cara is still working on it, despite what I told her. I think she either doesn’t quite believe me, or she’s thinking that she’ll be gone before anything magical happens with it.”

  “You couldn’t convince her to stop?”

  Mal shrugged. “How does that one quote go? The one about getting paid to understand?”

  “‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’ Upton Sinclair,” Lex said.

  “Or ‘If there’s a steady paycheck in it, I’ll believe anything you say.’ Winston Zeddemore,” Vinny added.

  “Cara’s getting paid to do it,” Dom said, “and that matters more to her than stopping a hellhole from opening.”

  “It’s not her fault,” Vinny argued. “She has no context for all this, and a girl’s gotta eat. A few months ago, if you’d suddenly showed up and told me that by playing a gig, I’d let evil into the world, I’d have thought you were high.”

  “But Cara knows magic is real now,” said Dom.

  “Sort of. She’s seen a ghost,” Mal said. “She’s seen me fight a ghost. But she’s never recognized a vampire, or seen any spell cast.”

  Lex drummed his fingers on the table. “We’ll have to show her. Convince her that we’re not joking around.”

  “I could cast a spell that’s more…theatrical than usual,” Dom said, “but if she’s determined to be skeptical, she could just say it’s a trick.”

  “That’s what would happen,” Mal said miserably. He looked down at Pumpkin, wishing none of this was happening. If the present was this messed up, what would the future bring?

  Oh, right, he’d seen what the future would bring.

  Mal said, “Dom, I have to talk to you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “It’s sort of…can we move?”

  Dom raised an eyebrow. “Ok.”

  The brothers walked to the porch, leaving Vinny and Lex caring for Pumpkin inside.

  “What’s up?” Dom asked, his expression serious.

  “I had a vision.”

  “Didn’t figure you for a prophet.”

  “Think how I felt.”

  “What happened?”

  Mal began, “I was lying in bed, and I was sort of asleep and sort of awake, you know…” He explained the branching visions, and the terrifying sense of finality in the future filled with fire. He finished with, “I don’t know any more than that. Dom, I’m not good at this sort of thing.”

  “You mean sticking around for more than a night?”

  “I mean visions. You’re the magic master. Tell me what this means.”

  “Maybe it means you shouldn’t sleep with every woman who crosses your path.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “No?”

  “Cara’s not some random chick I picked up in a bar.”

  “I agree. She’s a chick who is not random at all. She’s linked to the house on the hellhole we’ve been watching for the last year. If you weren’t thinking with your dick, it might have occurred to you that by inviting her into our home, you actually slapped some protection on our enemy.”

  “Cara is not our enemy.”

  “Maybe not, but regardless, it was a dumb-ass move. Hope you had a good time, though.”

  “I did! Right up till the moment where I had the vision of her body all burned up on the ground! If I make the wrong choice, she’ll die, Dom. I know it. I will have killed her.”

  “Mal, you said yourself that you were almost asleep. How do you know it wasn’t just a nightmare?”

  “I know the difference between dreaming and walking into the otherworlds.”

  “Do you? You’re not a huge fan of the otherworlds. You tend to avoid actually being in them at all. Maybe that was part of the nightmare.”

  It was no nightmare. He wandered into the otherworlds. I sensed it.

  They both looked at Behemoth, who’d followed them onto the porch.

  “He did?” Dom looked more worried.

  Mal tried to ignore the fact that Dom was taking the cat’s word more seriously than Mal’s.

  “What do I do about this?” he asked his brother.

  Dom looked helpless. “Avoid flammable things? I don’t know, honestly. We’re going to have to do some lookups.”

  “We could try to talk to Marigold too,” Mal suggested.

  “Sneak over at night and do a seance? That could work.”

  “Except for all the locks and floodlights and cameras.”

  “Well, you do know the foreman,” Dom pointed out. “Maybe you could come to an arrangement.”

  “The foreman hates my guts right now.”

  “This is a radical notion, but what if you apologized?”

  “She won’t even listen to me. I can’t get as far as an apology.”

  “You generally get as far as you want with women. And you need to let Cara know about this danger.”

  “She just found out that ghosts and vampires are real, and she barely believes in those things. She’s going to freak out if she hears I had a vision of her death.”

  Dom said, “I don’t care what a mess you’re making of your personal life. This is way more important. You need to get her back here so we can figure out what’s happening with that hellhole and how to stop it.”

  Chapter 19

  Cara successfully avoided any one-on-one with Mal since he ghosted her. She ghosted him back by ignoring all his texts, and basically hid in her office trailer or in the parlor on the job site. She thought she was safe when she got to her room at the Calendar Inn after work. But not long after, the landline phone rang.

  “Hi, Miss Michaels,” Thalia said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but you have a, um, visitor down here.”

  “Who?” Cara asked.

  “Mal Salem.” Thalia lowered her voice. “He’s being pretty insistent. But if you don’t want to talk with him, I can tell him to get lost.”

  She sighed. “He’ll just come back.”

  “Yeah. Mal’s used to things going his way.”

  Thalia spoke with a lot of authority on the issue. “Let me guess,” Cara said. “You dated him too.”

  “Me? No way. But my sister did for a little bit.”

  Of course. Cara stared at the ceiling. “Where is he now?”

  “I told him to wait in the lounge. But if a paying customer comes in, he’ll have to go. He does not match our hygge aesthetic, you know?”

  “I’ll come down and talk to him. Thanks for checking first.”

  Cara fully intended to go down there and just tell him to leave. But for so
me reason that meant she needed to change into less schlubby clothes and brush her hair and wash her face first. Damn, she didn’t have time to shower and she still smelled like a construction site. Oh, well.

  The lounge was the old living room of the house—a large space with big windows and a lot of modern couches. Mal was sitting on a midcentury number in green velvet, looking distinctly out of place in his long leather duster and his raw good looks and his smoldery….

  “What do you want?” Cara snapped out, just as annoyed at herself as she was at him.

  Mal practically rocketed off the couch when he looked up and saw her. He smiled at her, then faltered. “Cara. Thanks for coming.”

  “I was already here. Since I’m staying here.”

  “I mean, down here. To see me. I know you didn’t have to.”

  “How’s my cat?” she asked, hating that Mal knew Pumpkin’s status better than she did. But she needed to know how her little fluffmonster was doing.

  “He’s fine, but he misses you.”

  “Tell him I’ll get him as soon as I can.” She wanted that little creature in her life, with his soft coat and his insistent head-bops.

  “Yeah, Pumpkin’s doing fine. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Then maybe tell me why you bothered to come bother me?” she prompted after he just stood there like an oaf.

  “It’s about Egan House. Something we need to talk about. About…that one thing you saw?” He was looking over Cara’s shoulder, and she realized Thalia was in earshot, and definitely interested.

  “Which thing?”

  Ghost, he mouthed.

  “What about it?”

  “We learned some more about it and we’ve got a plan. Look, this is all a little X-Files. Can we talk in your room?”

  Cara took one more look at Thalia and decided that yes, it was better to keep talk of ghosts and vampires and whatever else quiet.

  “All right,” she said. “You’ve got ten minutes to talk and then you’re out.”

  He nodded.

  Hoping she wasn’t making giant mistake number two, Cara led Mal up the stairs to her room.

  “This place is nice,” Mal commented when he got inside.

  “I don’t need your opinion on my living arrangements, Mal Salem.”

  “Ok. Skipping directly to the main topic, the ghost you saw is very likely the spirit of Marigold Egan, a daughter who lived in the house and probably died the night of the fire. We want to do a seance to talk to her.”

  “Then do it. You don’t need me.”

  “Actually, we do. Because it needs to be at night, and you have the keys to the place and we need you to turn off the alarms and the floodlights and the cameras.”

  “Oh.” Cara nodded slowly. “I get it. First I was convenient for a hookup and now I’m convenient as a property manager. Great. Is there anything else I can do for you? Run to the post office? Get you some beer? Blow job? ’Cause I’m super into helping you after what you did the other night.”

  Mal sat down on the edge of the bed, without asking. “Are you really mad about that?” he asked hesitantly. “Like, still?”

  “Yeah. I did not like waking up alone in your bed in your house with your brother telling me that you running out on a girl was pretty standard behavior post hookup.” By the end, Cara’s words amped up, and she realized the whole place could probably hear her.

  Mal looked nonplussed. “I wouldn’t describe it as standard.”

  “That’s your defense?” Cara gaped at him. “You’re such a trilobite!”

  He blinked. “I’m a what?”

  “A trilobite. A lout. A caveman.”

  “You mean troglodyte.”

  “Don’t tell me what I mean, especially when you’re the caveman here,” Cara said. “Don’t cavesplain to me.”

  “Troglodyte means caveman,” said Mal. “And you said trilobite.”

  “What’s a trilobite, then?”

  “It’s an extinct prehistoric sea creature.”

  She glared at him. “Now you’re just making stuff up.”

  “Nope. I know because I once had to memorize all the state fossils. The trilobite is Wisconsin’s. And Ohio’s. And Pennsylvania’s. Which makes it easier to memorize.”

  Furious, she took her phone out and googled it.

  Fact.

  That made her more furious. “Well…you’re still a caveman and I hate you.”

  “Ok.”

  “Like I seriously hate you.”

  “Sorry to hear that. I like you.”

  “Ugh, just shut up.”

  “Can I get you a soda or water or something? You just yelled a lot.”

  “Water. There’s a beverage station in the lounge. And I still hate you.”

  A few minutes later, Mal returned with both a glass of tap water and a can of sparkling water. “Just in case,” he said, setting them both on the table.

  Cara took the tap water and sipped it. Her throat was kind of raw. She sat down on the edge of the bed and watched Mal uneasily.

  Mal walked over to the window that faced the front lawn and peered out in the night. He pulled the curtains closed. Then he withdrew another can from his coat. Cola. He popped it open and took a long drink. He said, “I shouldn’t have left that night. I’m sorry.”

  “Too little too late.”

  He finished the soda, absently crushing the empty can. “Can I tell you why I left?”

  “Would it matter?” she asked.

  “I think it might.”

  Mal wasn’t looking at her. His eyes looked everywhere but at her. Cara got a glimmering of his discomfort, the fact that he was maybe as upset by that night as she was.

  She crossed her legs and sat up straighter. Her paying attention pose. “Tell me.”

  He gestured to the bed. “Can I sit down?”

  “No.”

  Mal blinked, then nodded, as if chastised. He shrugged out of his coat, seized the nice leather armchair, and dragged it to the end of the bed. He sat down facing her.

  He said, “First off, it wasn’t a hookup.”

  Cara’s breath caught, and her heart did a weird flippy thing before she could tell it to calm down. “Wasn’t it? What do you call a non-date that results in sex and ends with one person leaving real fast?”

  “I don’t know what to call what we did. And I know that I shouldn’t have hit on you. For a lot of reasons. But I did, because I wanted to, and you seemed to want me to.”

  “I did,” she admitted. “The poor decision making was mutual.”

  Mal’s eyes held hers. “Afterward, in bed, you fell asleep, and I sort of fell asleep too. And then…this is going to sound weird, but I swear it’s true.”

  “You should get that on your business cards.”

  “Cara, let me talk. This isn’t easy.”

  “Ok. What happened?”

  “Do you remember when I told you about otherworlds? That there are these different realities and dimensions and some people can cross the boundaries?”

  At her nod, he went on, “One form of that is what you might think of as astral projection. Practitioners can sort of go into a trance, and their body stays here in the real world, but their spirit or soul or consciousness or whatever you want to call it can travel to the otherworlds. And there you might see auras, or find a lost soul, or see the future or the past or whatever you need to do. It’s an important skill for anyone who deals with magic. And in my family, where fighting evil is our thing, it’s essential to know how to do it.”

  “Ok.” Cara was wondering where this was all leading, but she was snared into the story by this point.

  “I can do it, but I’m not comfortable doing it. I hate separating myself from my body.” Mal actually gave a shake of revulsion as he talked. “I don’t know why, but I always have and I always will. Walking into the otherworlds that way is a horrible feeling, and I avoid doing it unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  He put his elbows on his knees and h
is head in hands, like a person nursing a terrible hangover. “That night, when I was falling asleep, with you right there, I thought I was dreaming. But I wasn’t. Without intending to do it, or even knowing I was doing it, I’d walked into the otherworlds.”

  “Is that…bad?”

  “Not necessarily. But damn, you want to be alert when you’re doing it. Luckily, the otherworld I was shown wasn’t imminently dangerous. But I did get a vision.”

  “Like…a vision of the future?”

  “Yes.” He looked up at her, his expression dead serious. “Your future.”

  Cara suddenly had trouble breathing. “What?” she gasped.

  “Two futures, actually. One good one, and one…bad one.”

  “Some details, please!”

  “I…shouldn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Visions are tricky things. Telling you a future I saw might change what you do, and change the futures.”

  “Well, isn’t that the damn point? If you saw a bad future, tell me so I can avoid it!”

  “I saw you trapped in a fire. Burning to death. And I couldn’t get you out.”

  Cold rushed over her, followed by a wash of sweat, her skin prickling in instinctual dread. “A fire?”

  “Not just that. The vision made it clear that something I do will make you die. That I’ll screw up, and you’ll be the one who suffers.”

  In a fire.

  “No.” Cara shook her head, over and over. “No. No. You can’t. You don’t get to decide things like that!” She started shivering, almost convulsing in her distress. No one but her should ever get to decide her life.

  Mal pushed himself off the chair and knelt in front of her on the bed, his hands cupping her shoulders. “Easy, Cara. I need you to keep it together, ok? There’s a good future too. One where you live. Where you’re happy.”

  “How do you know that? Why did you see that? Is this even real?”

  He reached up to stroke her hair. “Cara, sweetheart, take a breath. Count your breaths, ok? I think I saw your futures because we had just been…”

  “Fucking,” she choked out disbelievingly.

  “Let’s say…involved. And also, we’ve both been very close to a hellhole for a few weeks. And everything combined to sort of…spin my mind off into an otherworld.”